


Intervisible

by Zither



Category: Destiny (Video Game)
Genre: F/F, Mild Hurt/Comfort, Pre-Relationship, Telepathy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-02
Updated: 2016-04-02
Packaged: 2018-05-30 12:01:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,214
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6423163
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zither/pseuds/Zither
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Spending your days cooped up with the same handful of people isn't always easy, no matter how much you like them.</p><p>(Rain falls, tempers fray, and Ikora finds a moment of peace amidst it all.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Intervisible

**Author's Note:**

> I started this fic back when the pre-TTK patch came out, inspired by Eris' move indoors and Ikora's dialogue about her headaches. A few days ago, I decided to finish it. Includes a couple of ambient lines from the game.
> 
> Also cameoing: my own Warlock and her hopeless mentor-crush.

“Pretty sure she’s watching you again, Zav,” Cayde said, sly. Out of the corner of her eye, Ikora saw a string of lights flicker along his jaw. That sequence meant _boredom_ , or maybe _please pay attention to me_. Neither one was good news.

No amount of provocation could induce Zavala to look up once he was immersed in field reports, but Ikora felt him react: a blue-hot flash of alarm, so intense it made all the bones in her skull ache. Cayde left residue behind everywhere he went – exasperated fingerprints in the corner of a map, aimless frustration dogging his heels across the plaza, faint memories of laughter in the hangar bay - but Zavala kept his Light pared down to the quick. The unchecked strength of his response threw her off balance. She was drawing breath to reprimand Cayde when Zavala took the bait.

“Eris is blind.” With the fear under control, he was as blunt as ever. “She’s not watching anyone.”

“Come on. You know how those eyes work.” At least a quarter of Cayde’s attention was on the window. Monsoon season had all the City’s inhabitants on edge, but none more so than him. It was as if removing even the possibility of an exit from the Tower made his confinement less bearable. “She sees the Light.” He let out an exaggerated slurping noise.

“Cayde,” Ikora said - and now she was the one falling for it. Mentioning Eris was a surefire way to get at both her and Zavala, but it had been some time since he pushed her to the point of losing her temper.

“Hey, there’s no law says you can’t sit at the end of a hallway and creep on whoever’s in your line of sight.” Cayde gave an expansive shrug. “Even if they’d prefer you didn’t.”

“Eris is not staring at Zavala,” Ikora said. The words came out clipped, bitten off at the ends. “Eris is busy. As are we all.”

“Well, she’s staring at somebody,” Cayde said, a parting shot fired over the horizon. He bent his head, intent on the map again. “Ghost, mark this spot as a potential Crucible location. Shaxx’ll love it. Lots of sinkholes and crevasses for the new kids to fling themselves into.”

Not an apology. Still, it was a clear sign that he regretted starting the fight. Ikora almost kept the return barb in check - but she was tired of Cayde’s needling, of Zavala’s polite distrust. Her younger self would not have hesitated to strike a blow in Eris’ defence, ill-advised or not.

“Perhaps,” she said, giving in, “Eris watches you, and remembers a time when she answered to the Hunter Vanguard instead.”

Cayde’s head flew up. His face was bright, unguarded. Across the table, Zavala shot her a look of disapproval tempered by surprise. Neither of them had ever accused Cayde of abdicating responsibility; she doubted the thought had so much as crossed his mind. Whatever Eris had begun her second life as, her current situation fell far beyond the remit of any Hunter. Even before their mutual dislike calcified, she had made no attempt to reach out to Cayde. Her former peers did not seem to interest her more than any of the other Guardians who proved themselves willing and able to act on the intelligence she brought.

Once or twice, Ikora had wondered if the spectre of Yor played a part in driving Cayde to distance himself from someone who - given kinder circumstances - might have been his to teach. Once or twice… but that was a private matter, not one to be argued at table where any born spark might overhear. She did not begrudge Zavala his frowns. It was hard to say which of them deserved the reproach more.

The headache had stretched itself out into a line of heat behind her eyes. She let her thoughts stray to the hallway. A couple of City technicians were drifting back and forth across it. They seemed small and dim in the shadow of Shaxx’s unmistakable signature: a dense clot of lightning, as if one of the clouds outside had found its way indoors. Eris stood just beyond his sphere, a blurry silhouette edged in green. Her presence was a welcome wrongness. Silence was what Ikora needed: silence, and the dark. That fleeting brush of minds brought relief, like cool fingertips against her forehead.

But there was another shining light on the stairs, and its appearance demanded attention. It had to be one of hers; the cluster of loose particles trailing in its wake was a giveaway. Nothing could stopper the flow of students in need of advice: not early summer storms, not tensions among the Vanguard, not the pain creeping its way down toward her jaw. For a brief, unworthy moment, she hoped the little beacon had come to see Eris, Shaxx, Arcite – anyone but her.

 _Tal-16_ , Ghost supplied. _Strong void affinity. Solar affinity absent_. As if she needed a personnel file to tell her that! There were no currents of warmth running through the new arrival; she was a small, frozen body ringed in brilliance. She came to a halt at the top of the steps and hovered there, caught up in some private misery. Strange emotions bore down on Ikora: she tasted pale skeins of uncertainty, and underneath those, fear. _Afraid of us?_ Ghost wondered, and Ikora said: _She wouldn’t be the first_. A bitter thought. Another hot stab of agony in her temples loosened her tongue.

“I don’t bite, Guardian,” she said, sharper than intended. Tal flinched, lights dimming. Across the table, Cayde glanced up. He tried to blink sympathy at her charge, who was now staring at the floor as if sheer force of will could command it to open up and swallow her. Some childish part of Ikora said: it isn’t fair. If he had not gone out of his way to try her patience earlier, she might never have felt the urge to snap in the first place. She would have had more fortitude when it came to shielding herself against others’ distress; that much was certain.

To round off the whole awkward scene, Tal’s Ghost had emerged. In an indignant little voice, she said, “We admire you.”

“Shut up, Ghost,” Tal muttered. It was the longest sequence of words Ikora had ever heard her speak. If her own records had not said otherwise, she might have assumed muteness. Tal’s hand inched toward one of her cuffs, then fell back to her side. The fabric was frayed. She had been picking at it, and recently enough that the self-repair mechanism had not had time to kick in. Ikora did not need Ghost’s sudden flare of amusement to tell her they had misinterpreted the young Guardian’s anxiety.

“I’m sorry,” she said, voice gentle. “What do you have for me?”

The other Ghost gave her a long, slow blink. She chirruped at Tal, who withdrew a small object from her pocket. Even through the natural buffer of a Warlock gauntlet, Ikora could feel its uneven corners pressing up against her mind.

“We found this running distraction duty on the Dreadnaught,” Tal’s Ghost said, dancing a tight loop around her Guardian’s head. The thrill of discovery had wiped away any lingering resentment. “Tal wanted to leave it behind, but I said no. She had to dig right down into a pile of mouldy bonemeal and then she put her hand on a worm by mistake and the bits went everywhere. I laughed!”

“I didn’t,” Tal said. When she realised she had spoken out loud, her lights flared scarlet. Against her black-and-gunmetal paintjob, the effect was volcanic. Unfolding her fingers in a single jerky movement, she held out a shard of luminous bone. Its edges were keen, sharp enough to cut. Ikora checked herself before she could reach for it. She wanted to cup the fragment in her hands, open her cells to it, unwrap layers of ancient calcium to reveal the history beneath. But not here.

“Take this to Eris Morn.” That set off a wave of genuine fright. This time, Ikora’s defenses were up; all it triggered in her was a sense of weary resignation. Tal was not one of Eris’ Guardians, those select few who marked themselves out by wearing her sigil on their arms or over their shoulders or at their waists. She would know Eris as an obstacle to tiptoe around in the hallway, nothing more. “We've worked together for a long time. You can trust her.”

A distinct lack of conviction on Tal’s part – but when the Ghost spoke, her voice was clear and assured. “We’ll do that. Thank you.”

“It’s an impressive find,” she said, and was rewarded with a second flash of ruby-red light. They weren’t the first pair to come back from the Dreadnaught with similar treasures in hand, but there was no reason to tell them that. “I’ve got a good feeling about you, Guardian.” If she had thought it impossible for her student's eyes to grow any brighter, the next moment would have proved her wrong. Tal took a few quick steps backward, halted as if battling an internal impulse, then squeaked “’Bye!” and fled to the relative safety of the corridor. She made a beeline for Eris, who seemed to be a less fearsome prospect than another compliment from her own mentor.

 _Not a word_ , Ikora warned. Ghost’s laughter sang through the spaces between her ribs. An explosive cough rang out on the other side of the table; when she looked up, Zavala’s features were as solemn as ever. Cayde kept an uncharacteristic silence, but the faint glow around his mouth said it all. In any other circumstance, he would have eaten a tripmine before passing up the golden opportunity that had just been presented to him. As it was, they were still too raw to joke around. The three of them had worked together long enough to learn all each other’s sore spots.

Her eyelids felt heavy. The first item on her reader was a list of Cabal supply drops, awaiting translation and cross-comparison. It was busywork, a rote exercise. She could almost see Zavala’s scowl, but it did not keep her attention from straying to the window. For weeks, Guardians, citizens, and outwall traders trapped by the weather had been waiting for an end. City people lit crescent burners each morning and threw glowglobes in the river at night, hoping against hope that the light they cast would cause their unresponsive god to roll over in its sleep. The Traveller did not hear, or was in a contrary mood; instead of relief, each faint, foggy sunrise seemed to bring heavier rain. Wei Ning, she thought, would have appreciated it. Nobody else did, except the newborns who were experiencing their very first monsoon. She had caught a full fireteam up on one of the overhangs earlier, giggling as they flicked water at anyone who took refuge underneath. One of them had succeeded in creating a miniature vortex between his fingers, the better to suck in raindrops; she’d made a note of his advanced ability even as she lectured them on appropriate behaviour. Ghost, in the midst of laughter, had put a different mark next to Tal’s name: _loyal_. Both might someday be weaponised, if it came to that.

Had Tal left yet? Ikora wondered, as she often did, what Eris would think of the student she had sent her way. _A good excuse to glance back down the corridor instead of returning to our papers_ , Ghost said, wry. Eris was alone. Her hands rested idle on the pages of a book, but her eyes were fixed on the Hall itself. There was no reason a simple brush of gazes should feel like walking into the radius of an arc pulse; eye contact with Eris no longer fazed Ikora, if it ever had. Nonetheless, her breath caught. The nape of her neck felt hot. She did not want Eris to assume that she, of all people, had joined the ranks of the fearful.

A cold hand ghosted across her brow, stopping to rest there for a heartbeat. Ikora closed her eyes. Fingertips brushed her cheek in a hesitant caress, and she blinked them open again. No sign of suspicion from Cayde or Zavala. What they might suspect her of, she didn’t know.

The tension in her jaw had begun to ease. She looked down at the readout in front of her, and the alien characters fell into clear, simple patterns:

_8x shields Scablands, fourth turn. 11x p. rifles City, fourth turn. 16x s. rifles Valley, fifth turn._

As easy as dying. Even so, Ikora no longer chafed at the task. Eris had gone back to her book, but her presence was a tiny chip of ice behind Ikora’s eyes. It served as a friendly counterpoint to the chill emanating from those entities that lined the edges of her thoughts, things she could not name or give voice to within the boundaries of the Hall. Against the headaches, the hunger, the whispers that echoed even in vacuum - against everything that plagued them both, they were allies.

A small smile tugged at Ikora’s lips. Without needing to look, she knew Eris’ expression would mirror her own.


End file.
